NOWY CONNECT at Lift16

Connect with Lift16 attendees

You can use Nowy Connect to find and connect with interesting, nearby people who are also attending Lift16. It’s a great way to create new professional relations. Nowy Connect helps you find someone interesting, meet them, and stay in contact.

Think of it as a digital name tag + LinkedIn.

Nowy Connect shows you LinkedIn profiles of nearby people. You see their photos, names, headlines, industries, summaries, positions, and more. If you find someone interesting, you can ask them for a meeting right from the app. They will respond with the time and place. During a meeting, you can attach notes to your interlocutor’s profile, and the notes will show up the next time you meet them. You do not need to exchange business cards, rather you can save the interlocutor’s profile in Nowy Connect and access it at your leisure, even when they are no longer nearby.

Born out of necessity

We built Nowy Connect because we needed it! Last year, we attended a book launch party, and we wanted to meet representatives of a particular company who were supposed to be there.

Unfortunately, when we got to the event, there were no name tags and no list of attendees, so we didn’t know if any representative was nearby or who they were.

Now, you may be thinking that name tags would have solved the problem, but squinting at name tags is awkward, tiresome, and boring… but mostly awkward. And even if a dedicated event app had been available with the list of attendees, how do you know who is there and then at the event? Maybe some of them left, maybe some of them haven’t arrived yet. How do you know who are the interesting people? Do you really want to and have to scroll through 300 profiles? Nowy Connect makes these questions irrelevant.

Get going in 30 seconds

We love easy-to-use apps. All you need to do to use Nowy Connect on your iPhone is to install it, sign in with LinkedIn, and turn on your Bluetooth. That’s it. Nowy Connect will automatically get your public LinkedIn profile, share it with nearby people, and show your their profiles.

A smart listener powered by IBM WATSON’S Artificial Intelligence

Nowy Connect is a smart listener. You can tell it who you are interesting in meeting. For example, tell it "I’d like to meet software developers," and it will notify you when software developers are nearby. No more checking your phone to see if someone interesting showed up. Check out the video!

To understand who you’re looking for, Nowy Connect uses IBM Watson’s natural language processing and artificial intelligence abilities. When you sign up for Nowy Connect, your public LinkedIn profile is sent to IBM Watson. Watson looks at it and extracts concepts related to your profile, for example, "software development." When someone tells Nowy Connect they would "like to meet software developers," this text is sent again to IBM Watson that extracts the concept of "software development." Finally, Nowy Connect asks IBM Watson what are the profiles related to "software development" and stores the list. Whenever Nowy Connect sees a person whose profile is in this list, it notifies the user about that person.

High on privacy, low on battery consumption

Nowy Connect strives to provide you with the upmost privacy. This is the reason we use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE): we do not want to have to track your GPS coordinates or require you to check in to any place. Using BLE also helps reduce battery consumption and yields better accuracy.

Nowy Connect is continuously being developed, and we are keen on bringing you new functionality that helps you ever more be a smarter networker. But, for this, we need to know how you use Nowy Connect. The app uses Google Analytics to collect information that includes app events such as starting and stopping the app, the number of Nowy Connect users currently nearby, when you entered and when you left Lift, or which features of the app you used. Finally, all information Nowy Connect collects cannot identify you to a third-party.